Energy consumers living in Canterbury, New Zealand have a new option available that can offer price discounts of 20 percent on their weekend power use. 

Homeowners that have a smart meter installed can sign up with online electricity retailer Powershop for the discounted rates, the company announced on August 24.  Customers will receive the 20 percent discount when they consumer energy between the hours of 7am and 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays.  Once smart meters are installed in other parts of New Zealand, the program will become available as well.

Consumers welcome the new program as electricity prices rose 72 percent over an eight year period for residential customers according to a report released earlier this year.  Gerry Brownlee, Energy and Resources Minister, said the spiralling prices were "massively out of step" with the consumer price index (CPI) which had only risen 29 percent during the same time period.

Brownlee oversaw a review of the industry designed to increase competition in order to reign in rising energy prices.  Brownlee welcomed Powershop's new program.  "Any of this is welcome," he said.  "This is the sort of thing we should have been seeing in a competitive sense years ago.  It is encouraging."

Energy consumers living in Canterbury, New Zealand have a new option available that can offer price discounts of 20 percent on their weekend power use.  Homeowners that have a smart meter installed can sign up with online electricity retailer Powershop for the discounted rates, the company announced on August 24.

 

Meridian Energy, owned and maintained by the New Zealand State, also owns Powershop but the subsidiary is managed by an independent board of directors.  Ari Sargent, chief executive at Powershop, said the new initiative is permanent.

"To hell with the incremental price games the other power companies play," said Sargent.  "We want to change the game and do everything we can to help the power consumers of New Zealand get a better deal."

Orion, responsible for power distribution in the country, also helped the project along because it began charging lower transmission rates on the weekends.  "What also makes it possible now is Christchurch is the first city to have a decent number of smart meters, with more than 150,000 of them in the Orion network," Sargent explained.

"So what we have here is the first smart meter product in New Zealand.  "Retailers have not been doing anything with the smart meters that they haven't done normally before."

Sargent says families stand to benefit the most from the new program because that is when they use the most energy.  Families that shift power-hungry tasks to the weekend, such as doing laundry, will save the most.

Powershop first became available at the end of February.  More than 1000 have signed up on Orion's network and more than 3000 have signed up in total.  "We are hopeful that this deal and others will accelerate our customer numbers," added Sargent.  "We've only been in the market for six months, so [it is] early days."  Customers already signed up with Powershop will automatically receive the discounts.  The company wants to extend to other regions but has met resistance from transmission companies and smart meters first have to be installed.

"All the retailers in our electricity network pay us very low line charges at night and weekend, and Powershop is the first retailer to pass that on to customers, which I think is great," said Roger Sutton, chief executive of Orion.  "This is good news for local customers but it's also good they get some benefit from the smart metering installed across the network by retailers, giving customers savings, passing them on when electricity is cheaper to generate and deliver."